I'm not a very musical person. It's not that I haven't tried. From lessons playing the glockenspiel (yes, I'm the kid whose drumstick broke in week 2 and never got replaced...) to the flute (in year 2 I started biting on the mouthpiece, hoping it would break and I could sneak out of classes...), piano/keyboard (my skills were so great that the teacher fell asleep within the first five accords. Every.Single.Time.) and the violin (quite annoying to carry that monstreous case on a 90min way to school by foot-bus-train-foot and back). My parents really tried to plant that musical seed. With minor success.
But still, I like music. My last concert was at Frankfort Special. A...

That's what it looks like after 2 hours of snorkeling and not noticing that your shirt was a few inches displaced...

I have been in Belize for the better part of a year now. I arrived with a backpack full of things that I didn’t need or that I could’ve easily bought here. A few things I brought proved to be very valuable. For the rest I just begged visiting friends.
Here are the 5 things that are essential when visiting Belize:
Sunscreen
For me, sunscreen used to belong in the same category as machetes, bug spray and rum: It’s something that people need where you go on a daily basis so you can safely assume that they have it readily available. This worked out quite well for me until I came across a batch of fake sunscreen that gave me the worst sunburn in years.
Don’t fall for...

Belize has a national animal (Tapir), a national tree (Mahagony), a national flower (Black Orchid) and a national bird (Keel Billed Toucan).
I was able to scratch Tapir, Mahagony and Black Orchid off of my list months ago, shortly after getting here.
But that Toucan ... just didn't want to show!
And it's not like I didn't try. At Maruba I even got up at 5 in the morning and walked along the road where they supposedly sit in the morning. Nopes. Didn't work.
Earlier this year, we were staying at Chaa Creek and Frank and myself got up early again to go on a bird watching. Now - if you're a regular reader you know how big of a fan of bird watching I am. But ... Fr...

In order to measure the impact of a project you have to know what the basis is. For our "Saving Lives in the Caribbean Through Prepardness" Disaster Risk Reduction project we worked on exactly that in the past weeks. In all the 14 communitites we did the so called "baseline" survey to measure how well prepared is 'the' community. In order to do that, 100 households per community get asked 32 questions. 32 Questions that I repeated for almost two weeks, every day in a row. 32 questions that follow you from breakfast to bed. And it takes quite a few days to recover and not think of
"Do you think natural disasters are A) great concern B) little concern C) no concern or D...

A very unusual sunday. Doing nothing. Hanging around. Playing. Reading. Sleeping.
I could get used to this!
The other Challenges Worldwide volunteers text us in the morning if we want to come to Old Belize. It's a restaurant/bar/mini museum with a sort of artificial lagoon to swim in.
And it has a water slide. A big one.
We share a big taxi over (it's about 10 minutes out of town on the Western Highway). The others have themselves a lunch while I run out for a quick workout. Short and sweet with bonus points for the coolest location yet: A helipad overlooking the Carib Sea.
Then it's plantsching time. Water slide. Swing. A few beers.
Oh what a blissfully...

(I waited to publish this tongue-in-cheek article for several reasons - this was written a few weeks ago when I was working 24/7 for the Coalition to save our natural heritage, a union of NGOs in Belize trying to fight oil drilling in Belize's reef.)
Wednesday, 2:05 pm, Propaganda Desk
“Please report to the propaganda desk!” I holler across the office to get my colleague’s attention. The propaganda desk, you see, is my desk. I am the dedicated propagandist. I was appointed over lunch.
I am German, but I think the other reason for my new, enthusiastically announced appointment is the fact that I have a shiny new MacBook that can put videos on YouTube in about ...

After what some may consider careers in consulting and logistics, we quit our jobs, sold our stuff and left Germany to be full-time travelers and development volunteers. This blog is about our travels, our work as volunteers and our alternative life strategies - always looking to make an impact and to find the meaning in what we do or put some into it if we can't find any.

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This website is about Kerstin & Holger Heinze - we're two yuppies from Frankfurt Germany who were so sick and tired of our corporate careers that we sold everything we owned to fund a year abroad.
We are working as volunteers, first skilled in our fields of expertise and then unskilled for grass roots charities.
At the same time, we're on our honey moon doing what we love: Travel, meet new people, go new places.
Right now we are in Belize, Central America working for the Red Cross and the Belize Tourism Industry Association.